"Show Me On The Doll Where The Black Eyed Peas Touched You."

Initially I had planned on writing a fairly short and straightforward critical analysis of the Super Bowl  XLV half–time show. Featuring one of my least favourite musical acts ever performing twelve minutes of what very well may be the worst televised audio/visual spectacle since the Star Wars Christmas Special, I allege a great wrong was visited upon my mental faculties. What follows is pretty much the police report my brain filed after surviving what could easily be argued as “Aggravated Mental Assault And Battery” in a court of law. You’ll pardon me now while I go to Mexico to pay a guy I know in Juarez to replace my brain with a brain shaped bag full of time release heroin.

It's not as if the paragons of taste that organise Super Bowl half-time shows have a history of not producing forgettable, snooze inducing spectacles, but I'm almost certain that I very briefly experienced what it's like to have narcolepsy at the start of this show. "Tonight", or whatever the fuck it's called (because I'm seriously not going to Google the words to a song that consists almost entirely of the word "tonight") is the epitome of songwriting laziness and cringe inducing lyrics. The track recycles the same tired progression for five IQ lowering minutes while Patty Wets-Herself and crew blather on about "the night" and "spending up" the freight ships of money they make from passing aural smegma off as music people should tolerate. Here we have "Tonight, Good Night (It’s Gonna Be A Good Night, It’s Gonna Be A Real Good Night, It’s Gonna Be A Good, Good Night)" condensed into less than a minute, proving that not only is the track is un-listenable at any length, but... what the fuck are you people wearing? You look like rejects from the set of “Mad Max 4: Kegger At The Discodrome”. I'm not quite sure how Will.I.Am got a hairnet from the year 2089, but if The Black Eyed Peas can time travel then we might as well just nuke ourselves into oblivion right now. Wait a minute, though... What if they catch wind of the impending nuclear holocaust they’ve sparked, time travel to right before it happens and install themselves as some sort of pop demig... OH MY GOD. MARTHA, GET MY GUN! THIS ENDS HERE.

"See this thing on my head? It cost more than a Prius."

Only being vaguely familiar with the second song of this... football medley? I know I've interrupted at least three of my sentences so far, but seriously this shit is short circuiting my brain. Do other countries, or even sports for that matter, pull this shit? What the hell does this have to do with the game? Are football fans so goddamned brain-dead they need 15 minutes of whatever this shit is just to pump them up for a bunch of guys smashing into one another and playing grabass for 4 hours?

At any rate, since it was endlessly repeated for the duration of the minute and a half cum eternity of the snippet, I surmised that the title of the second bit was called “Boom Boom Boom”. Curious, I actually Googled this one and found out it's called "Boom Boom Pow". At this point I went to my happy place. My happy place is kind of like the very end of "Stand By Me". In my happy place I had an epic, cinematic adventure as a young adolescent and it powerfully shaped my life in dynamic and meaningful ways, and now I'm a successful writer with a loving wife, a beautiful home and children and I don't write about things I hate for comedic effect or possible republication on an hilarious online website. Then, through this beautiful dream of a satisfying life of hard work and savvy choices, I hear Fergie’s autotuned "voice" choke out the line "I'm so two-thousand and eight, you so two-thousand and late!". And with a pitiful whine, not unlike that of a dying dog or a morbidly obese person whose just realised they've run out of deep fried cake at the "Fuck the American Heart Association" buffet, I return to reality and continue to watch the people on my screen fail miserably at entertaining me.

I have to admit the "glowy" people are kind of neat though, which scores this comedy of terrors at least one point for a review I wasn’t even aware I was keeping score in. For the record, I'm not. For those of you who haven’t watched this monstrosity, the “glowy” people I refer to are hundreds of dancers in formation, wearing what I assume to be extremely sophisticated remote controlled light-up LED suits. I say “I assume” they’re extremely sophisticated because, at times, large swathes of the formations are blacked out. It’s a bit like the hugest, most expensive "hunt for the busted Christmas light bulb" in history. Remeber all those colour-guard kids that even you used to pick on while wearing your 16th level Paladin costume? Yeah, they work for the Super Bowl now.

Alright, so that garbage is over and... OH GOD TURN FERGIE’S AUTOTUNE BACK ON RIGHT THIS FUCKING MINUTE! If it wasn't a technical call on Fergie's part to turn off the autotune when she horridly screeched "PEOPLE IN THE PLAAEIAIACCE" (translation mine) then I bet the guy running the sound on Fergie’s channel had his throat slit at the end of this performance. At the beginning of the show the volume on her vocal channel was at zero for nearly a full second and now this. I'm betting his forensically disfigured corpse is being buried somewhere under the astroturf of Cowboys stadium by Fergie herself as I write this review. Actually, I think it might have been her that made the call to sing without crutches. What the fuck is she doing? It sounds like thirty cats with terminal feline AIDS in heat are having some sort of deathmatch orgy in her larynx. And why the hell is she imploring Will.I.Am to "drop them beats, now"? He's not even doing anything aside from looking like a bedazzled Luftwaffe general and kind of, sort of singing with the help of computers. Gods this is painful. Wait, is that... Oh wow, I guess they're going to cover "Sweet Child Of Mine".  Annnnd Slash just rose up from beneath the stage on a smoke filled platform. If I were him, I would literally hike my guitar at Will.I.Am's throat (he's got that protective head gear on and we're looking for a disabling blow here) and drop kick one of Fergie’s tits into the end-zone. Well, since he's not doing that, let's see how this goes (protip:  it goes badly).

Alright, for starters, did we really need a giant neon arrow of glowy people pointing at Slash? I mean, yeah, I guess in the nosebleed section motherfuckers were like "Slash! Where!?" and the arrow was kind of helpful. At that point, however,  you couldn't fucking see anyone else anyway so it's completely redundant. I find the fact that the neon arrow pulsates like a bioluminescent deep sea squid horrifyingly hilarious. I’ll just go ahead and assume Cthulu choreographed that bit.

"Up next on Blue Planet: Life At The Sea Vent, Slash performs a medley of songs from The Little Mermaid."

So by my estimate I’d say, note-wise, Fergie had about a 60% accuracy rating in her butchering of forty seconds of the first half of the first verse of “Sweet Child Of Mine”, which is approximately 59.5% more than I expected her to hit within an estimated .5% margin of error. It’s actually kind of frightening that Axl's vocal range is well above hers. Have we confirmed that Fergie’s not really a dude? Not that it would matter. I mean, it’s not like it would make her any cooler or anything, but it might explain the shoulder pads. What’s with her vocal inflection here? She sounds like she’s channeling Scott Weiland via Eartha Kitt on Quaaludes and she seems to be hanging onto Slash like he’s an upended chaise lounge. I’m half blinded by his goddamned DIAMOND ENCRUSTED TOPHAT, but think I can see Slashes paycheck jutting out of the headband and it’s got more zero’s than the national deficit (loldeficit). Also, if you listen closely, Slash totally fucked up the vast majority of the song. Virtually none of it was in time and he even flubs a few parts. To be fair, I mean, dude is wearing black sunglasses at night and he seems to be smouldering, suggesting that perhaps his underclothes are have caught fire. So I guess, for what it’s worth, he did a somewhat respectable job. Rock stars never die, they just whore themselves out for vacuous shit like this so they can afford that next sweet hit of liquid crack-amphetamine.

Okay, that was painful. Extra super duper, paper cuts over 75% of my body painful. What fresh hell is nex… ALLAH FUCK ME WITH A CHAINSAW, NOT MISIRLOU TOO!!!!

Ow.

Owwwwww.

Hold on a second. Where the fuck did Slash go? No, seriously. He just disappeared. I thought he might have been playing Misirlou but A: the guitar was in time with the beat and B: when they cut back he had vanished.  I was kind of hoping he would comically descend back down to whatever pit of nude women and cocaine he was elevated from at the start of the song, but I guess he just unceremoniously hopped off the side of the platform to go freebase super-heroin with an unemployed cheerleader or something.

Getting back to Misirlou, this sucks. I was not aware this Black Eyed Peas song even existed, so again I put my trust in a shadowy multi-billion dollar search corporation and came to find that it’s a song called “Pump It” they released in 2006. I love Misirlou, don’t get me wrong, but it’s one of the most played out surf songs in the history of surf music. In fact, it’s not even a surf song. It’s a traditional Greek folk song that Dick Dale rearranged on a bet that he couldn’t play a rockin’ surf banger on one guitar string, going to show that you should never bet Dick Dale shit, ‘cause he’ll smoke your ass for breakfast and make a bajillion dollars off the resultant hit song.

The above information isn’t really common knowledge, but the song is incredibly popular. Even if you’ve never heard another surf song in your life, most people with any sort of pop cultural reference have seen Pulp Fiction.

Apparently not Will.I.Am.

According to Will.I.Am¹, not only had he never even heard the song until sometime in 2005 (an event which apparently inspired him to ruin it), the compilation CD he bought that it was featured on wasn’t even something he intended to buy. Then via a kind of musical “Planes, Trains and Japanese Parks & Recreations Divisions” he put the song together on various modes of public transit and recorded the vocals in a park in Japan. And that’s how we went from:

My Misirlou your sweet glance

Has lit a flame in my heart.

Oh, My love, Oh, My Night

Your two lips are dripping honey, ah.

-Traditional Greek lyrics

To this:

When we play you shake your ass

Shake it, shake it, shake it girl

Make sure you don’t break it, girl

Cause we gonna

Turn it up

-Something Will.I.Am scribbled on a discarded bento napkin

Alright, focus. The research for the previous song provided me with enough of a distraction that I think I might be able to muddle my way through the rest of this pabulum. Up next is the innocuous “Let’s Get It Started”. Truth be told, this song doesn’t really inspire in me the kind of vitriolic hatred that most of the other Black Eyed Peas songs do. Other than the fact that it was the one boring, unfunny part of Hot Tub Time Machine, “Let’s Get It Started” is just a pop flat-line for me. Let’s see if there’s anything I can ridicule in the Pea’s glorified million dollar karaoke of the thing. Well… they’re still wearing those stupid light-up clothes.

And the basic concepts of Tetris seem to have escaped them.

What’s next? Oh hey, Usher! He’s a bit of alright in my book. He’s got some tunes I like, actually. Annnnnd, this is not one of them. Kind of like “Let’s Get It Started”, this song is just boring and predictable. The dancing is pretty tight, though. Usher does this massive jump split over Will.I.Am at one point that I’m pretty sure he needed surgery for after the show. If not for nothing, the brave face he put on after a five foot drop directly to his man-purse is the highlight of the show so far. Is this songs title an internet acronym? It is. Those new BMI character restrictions on song title lengths are fucking Draconian, man!

Moving along, next we have the obligatory, bleeding heart, “shave the homeless, kids shouldn’t live out of the trunk of a Honda Civic, Mr. President jam your finger up the countries collective rectum and stimulate our job prostate” song, “Where Is The Love?” Those last two boring songs lulled me into a false sense of complacency. I was almost certain I would have nothing to spew acrid complaints about for the rest of the video (three minutes and counting, still), but lo and behold they shat this saccharine turd directly into my ear canal. Aww, Taboo’s light-up jacket has a little light-up red heart on it. He looks like an S&M tin man. I have no desire to find out what kind of lube he’s got in his “oil can”. On a serious tip is there anything more reprehensible and obnoxious than rich pop artists lugubriously vomiting another "peace anthem" into the collective public consciousness? I'm no warmonger, but the the line "makin' wrong decisions, only visions of them dividends" is so staggeringly hypocritical it both honestly calls into question the writers sanity² and is enough to drive anyone with half a brain to write in "Pol Pot's reanimated corpse, Haile Mariam, or maybe even Gaddafi if he survives this Libya thing" on the next presidential election ballot.  Did Will.I.Am just rhyme “mama” with “mama”? Someone really needs to fucking tell that guy that rhyming a word with the same goddamned word isn’t rhyming. Its brain damage and he needs to see a neurologist immediately.

Speaking of brain damage, let’s say you’re the music director for a massive sporting organisation and you’re in charge of coordinating a 13 minute medley of boring or downright awful songs. Where do you put the sensitive “save the world” song? A song wherein its authors plead to God to “send some guidance from above”? Directly after Usher flies down from the ceiling of a superdome to sing a song about how he fell in love with a girl at a bar that contains the line “Honey got some boobies like wow, oh, wow”, of course. Come on people, this isn’t Farmville here. These decisions affect people’s lives.

Oh god. What’s happening now? Are they going to sing “Time Of My Life”? Luckily they can’t really ruin that song because it was crap to begin with. I never thought I’d say this but this is the first time I’ve ever been glad to hear this song. Well, not glad. Something approaching “less enraged than I currently am”, I guess would be the sentiment I’m searching for. Oh sweet, the Blockheads from Gumby are here… prancing to the chorus of a song off the “Dirty Dancing” soundtrack. What the fuck is happening? This is like the collective bad trip of a million dead party kids. Ah, it’s the bookend to the medley. Good, this shit is over.

The Dada horror, however, can not be unseen.

The whole field turns into a rave, the squarehead showgirls trigger a cough syrup flashback in a part of my brain I don't think even existed before I watched this crap, the Peas start naming off days of the week and implore the nation to “party everyday” and four hours of my life I can never reclaim are wasted writing about an event everyone in the known universe will forget completely in a month’s time. I hope you’ve enjoyed my agony. I sure as hell haven't. But the lulz, people. Where is the lulz? They was inside you all along.

Good night, and good lulz.

¹http://umusic.ca/blackeyedpeas (ah shit, link’s broken, let’s just trust Wikipedia on this one)
²http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1484775/making-black-eyed-peas-where-love.jhtml